Mr Crippen, Cora and the Body in the Basement

By Matthew Coniam

The historic 1910 London domestic murder case is re-examined using new DNA evidence in this true crime study.

It was an 'open and shut' case. Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American quack doctor, had murdered his wife, the music hall performer Belle Elmore, and buried parts of her body in the coal cellar of their North London home. But by the time the remains were discovered he had fled the country with his mistress disguised as his son. After a thrilling chase across the ocean he was caught, returned to England, tried and hanged, remembered forever after as the quintessential domestic murderer.

But if it was as straightforward as the prosecution alleged, why did he leave only some of the body in his house, when he had successfully disposed of the head, limbs and bones elsewhere? Why did he stick so doggedly to a plea of complete innocence, when he might have made a sympathetic case for manslaughter? Why did he make no effort to cover his tracks if he really had been planning a murder? These and other questions remained tantalising mysteries for almost a century, until new DNA tests conducted in America exploded everything we thought we knew for sure about the story. This book, the first to make full use of this astonishing new evidence, considers its implications for our understanding of the case, and suggests where the real truth might lie.

Praise forMr Crippen, Cora and the Body in the Basement

“This is a well-researched book on a 1910 murder case in London that is accumulating increasing interest comparable, in some ways, to Jack the Ripper.” —Alan Moss, The History of the Yard

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781399009737

Book preview

Prologue

Hawley Harvey Crippen was not the only one whose fate hung upon the result of his appeal for his conviction for murder. So, too, did that of his Madame Tussaud’s waxwork. It had already been completed, to a chilling standard of accuracy, thanks in no small measure to those famous photographs of the accused in the dock: not an illegal practice at the time but strongly discouraged, and usually only permitted by prior arrangement. These had been taken, according to the legend, by Jack Tussaud, great-great-grandson of the original, using a camera hidden in a bowler hat. ¹ But the museum was forbidden from displaying the result until the appeals procedure had been completed. If Crippen had been released, it would have been all for naught, and the figure would have been melted down. But of course, things did not go Crippen’s way, and his surrogate stood in the museum’s Chamber of Horrors for over a century, until the whole exhibit was permanently mothballed in 2016. ² And somehow he has endured, long outlasting his shock value, into an age when the crime of which he was accused would be lucky to get a paragraph or two on page five, elected to that folkloric afterlife where fact and fiction can take turns without censure, keeping company with the likes of Dick Turpin, Guy Fawkes and Captain Kidd.

It was a not particularly complicated case, nor all that surprising, provided it was taken at face value. Murder in the family – for financial gain or to get rid of an encumbrance, and committed using poison – crowds out most other forms of murder in the literature. A henpecked husband, arsenic in the tea, the wife away visiting her sister, a new lump in the flower bed: the Crippen case deviates from these clichés only in its fine print. And in the years that followed there was Seddon (convicted in 1912) and Smith (1915), True (1922) and Heath (1946), Haigh (1949) and Christie (1953). Their crimes all made the headlines too, and equally gripped the nation as their trials unfolded. But never, quite, in that grim pantheon, did they displace his memory in the popular imagination. How many today would immediately link the name George Joseph Smith with the Brides in the Bath murders? Was it Haigh or Heath who had the acid bath? Few, I suspect, could tell you. But say ‘Dr Crippen’ and there again he stands in the mind’s eye: small, quiet, mild-mannered, fastidious, his hair reddish, brilliantined, thinning, with fishlike eyes peering through round, gold-rimmed spectacles.

Three things above all made his story a sensation. The first was the gruesomeness of the discovery: a filleted, dismembered corpse, beneath the bricks of the coal cellar in a gloomy, three-storey London house. The second was a quite unexpected dash of wild and tragic romance: the fact of Crippen and his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, attempting to flee justice by ship to Canada, disguised as father and son. It was all so thrilling, so dramatic, it could easily have sprung from the yellow pages of some sensational work of fiction, and there were even those so caught up in the sheer melodrama of it as to wish quite openly that the fugitives be allowed to snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat. The third was its accidental but intoxicating marriage of technological progress and audience participation – wireless telegraphy, a new invention that both secured Crippen’s arrest and gave the newsreading public vicarious access to the thrill of the chase in real time, as the villains rushed, oblivious, not to freedom but into the waiting arms of the law. An Edwardian version of O.J. Simpson’s ‘white Bronco chase’, if you will.

If Crippen is the dark saint of British crime, his simple, haunting effigy at Madame Tussaud’s was surely the sacred relic. For decades, and still when I first visited him in the early 1980s, he was situated in the dock at his arraignment, the faithful Ethel by his side. More recently he stood alone in a prison cell. Would he have been pleased or saddened to have been parted from his loved one? Saddened, perhaps, at the thought of facing eternity without her; pleased that she was no longer ignominiously on show in a so-called ‘chamber of horrors’ (a peculiar place for anyone who had been found unequivocally not guilty to have ended up in the first place). Apparently, she was removed in 1996.

Crippen the martyr, the role in which he cast himself in his plaintive final letters, makes more sense without the reassuring presence of his lady love in any case: En ma fin gît mon commencement (In my end is my beginning). And amidst all the bleak evidences of man’s inhumanity on display all around, he stood apart even before he stood alone. A small man, seemingly weary and resigned; not elderly yet somehow frail; well dressed: frock-coated (grey, with shiny lapels); hands folded (neatness, composure); his stare glassy, and fixed at some indistinct distant spot. There was a genuine uncanniness about it; it is as if it had something it wanted to tell you. Some twist in the tail, maybe; some final act, still unwritten, to offset the anti-climax of a jury taking only twenty-seven minutes to find him guilty as charged. Something bizarre and incredible, some evidence of unbelievable error, or oversight, or coincidence, unacknowledged by all who took it knowingly or obliviously to the grave…

But if so, where was it to be located? Not still hidden in that dingy, gaslit, Edwardian house of secrets, at any rate. The house, like all who passed through it, is a ghost, a memory, an idea; its end hastened by the bomb that landed in its garden on the night of 8 September 1940. It was the first major air raid of the Second World War.

The same raids struck Madame Tussaud’s, destroying over 300 head moulds and leaving many figures scattered and broken, like dead bodies. But Crippen, sad and watchful, survived. Unlike its utterly luckless real-life counterpart, the wax figure had twice withstood catastrophe already. It was untouched in the 1925 fire that destroyed many of the other figures, closing the museum for two years, and drawing a crowd 10,000 strong to watch the salvage operations. ‘How are Deeming, Price and Crippen?’ they called to the firemen exiting the building.³ According to a correspondent of Inspector Dew’s whose letters are preserved in the police files, ‘a lusty cheer went up’ among the crowd who had assembled at the conflagration when the news was received that Crippen had survived.⁴ Because of its basement location, the Chamber of Horrors, in which the water from the fire department’s hoses collected, was the least damaged part of the exhibition. The Illustrated Police News published a delightful drawing of Crippen’s figure being lifted from the flood, titled ‘Dr Crippen Saved from a Watery Grave’. Then, in 1931, he narrowly avoided destruction again when the Dogger Bank earthquake, Britain’s severest ever, had sent his wax head tumbling to the floor at his feet. According to some reports the head split in two,⁵ one portion falling and the other ‘remaining lying on his shoulder, adding a new horror to the Chamber of Horrors’.⁶ But again the icon was preserved; again Saint Crippen was delivered safe from harm, as if in restitution for some unknown injustice. Now he bides his time in the gloom of some locked storeroom, still awaiting the day – and he was sure it would arrive – when new evidence came to clear him, and he might again come out of the darkness and into the light.

The enduring fascination of the Crippen case to armchair detectives, I think, is attributable to the sheer mass of contradictions it is required to support. There is its strange mixture of the mundane and the exotic: a conventional domestic murder, buried in the heart of respectable suburbia, yet peopled with a cast of characters fit for any melodrama, headed by a failed music hall artiste as victim, and a huckster selling patent medicines as chief suspect. The mild-mannered husband who wouldn’t harm a fly not merely poisoning his wife but dismembering and filleting her. The careful killer who obliterated all means of identification from the corpse, then wrapped what was left of the remains in his own pyjama jacket and threw in the victim’s hair curlers. The ingenious fiend who successfully removed head, limbs, skeleton and genitals, spiriting them away to somewhere they have never been found, then opted to leave a lump of leftover flesh in the cellar of his rented house, complete with an incriminating scar. The fugitive who compelled his mistress to pretend to be his son, knowing that the world was looking for them. Then, at his trial, his dogged protestation of innocence in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, when he might perhaps have made a sympathetically heard case for accidental death, and received a sentence for manslaughter. And that strange feeling – they all sensed it – that the man had no fight in him, that he was almost willing his own conviction, or at least not so much as lifting a finger to prevent it. The only logical reading was that here was a man stupefied with guilt – yet he went to his grave proclaiming his complete and absolute innocence.

All of these remained tantalising puzzles for just under a century, and looked set to remain so for all the centuries to follow. But then, in 2007, came another bombshell. Scientists in America had uncovered evidence that turned the whole case utterly on its head, just as Crippen had predicted. It was a bigger explosive for sure than the one that landed on the house over half a century before, and its debris scattered over an infinitely wider area. Some of the pieces remain in motion, descending still, and it is yet to be seen exactly how they land, and in what arrangements. But enough of the smoke has cleared already, and enough of the dust settled, to establish that almost everything we thought we knew about the body in the cellar, the henpecked husband, the harridan wife and the saintly lover was wrong. In some cases, we have merely been looking at it from the wrong angle, as if mistaking a reflection in the mirror for the person stood in front of it. Here, all that is needed is a minor change in emphasis, a shift in perspective, a slight widening of the range of possibilities, and all the known facts gently step back, allow the new insight to settle into place, and then easily coalesce around it as before. But in other cases, the new evidence is so transfiguring, so entirely disruptive of the very bedrock of the case as we have understood it until now, as to suggest that what we took for a true image was in reality the grotesque, wilful distortions of a funfair hall of mirrors. This is that story – what we thought we knew about Dr Crippen and the secret in his basement, what we know now, and whether there is any way, over a hundred years later, that we can join these two seemingly contradictory histories into one coherent account, one that tells us what might really have happened at number 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, North London, in the cold months of January and February 1910.

What did Crippen know? One thing that we can now say for certain that he knew, and that likely only he knew, was that the truth was not being revealed in court, merely a yellow journalism version of it that he had no means of countering. The Crown’s case was not disingenuous, and those who advanced it, like the jury, were sure it was correct. But it was for all that a glib and convenient fiction. So maybe that was what we read in the expression on his effigy and the source of that strange sense of fatalism he conveyed to those around him: his understanding of the one thing we supposedly all know about fiction, yet forget all too easily. That the truth is often stranger.

It is necessary to look a little below the surface of things to find a reason for the fact that Dr Crippen and his companion have become objects of international interest, and that there has gathered at the Canadian port where the ship carrying them will touch a little army of high police officials and a much larger one of reporters, those efficient and infallible representatives of public emotion.

Crippen himself is a wholly commonplace person, notable only, apart from the crime of which he is more than suspected, as a member of an honourable profession who has for many years disgraced it by putting his knowledge and his degree at the service of quackery and charlatanism. Of the woman with him little could and nothing need be said, while the murder – admitting that there has been one, which is not quite certain – contained nothing of the romantic or the unusual to give it more than a narrowly restricted notoriety. Yet no small part of the civilised world has a considerable fraction of its attention fixed on these fugitive travellers, and is awaiting their arrest with thrilled impatience.

The explanation of this queer phenomenon doubtless is to be found in the present existence of a true dramatic ‘situation’ that is fast approaching a logical climax. And for once chance has arranged scene and circumstances in strict accord with a rule or principle well known to playwrights and always used by theme with confident assurance of its effectiveness. That rule is to let the audience or the spectators know exactly what is going to happen, while the people on the stage, or those of them upon whom interest is fastened, move forward to their predestined sorrow or joy in complete ignorance of coming events. The theory is that this gives to the observers a pleasant sense of superiority – of ability to see things hidden from others. That must be at least an approximation to the truth.

In this case, however, a feeling something like pity may be mingled with the other – a feeling that it is not quite fair to hunt down and capture a murderer by means of a device, wireless telegraphy, with which other murderers as bad as he have not had to contend. Of course, when dragged out into the light, that is instantly seen to be an absurd compunction or resentment, but it has an obvious analogy with the equally absurd antagonism which new methods of warfare excite among nations that do not at all recoil from the employment of those with which they are familiar. As if it made any difference from what direction comes that shot that kills!

New York Times, 30 July 1910

Chapter 1

The Discovery

Crime is a social activity, and inevitably thrives in and around centres of civilisation. More than half the memorable murders of Britain have happened in London, and many notable killers have had London associations. Patterns of crime associate with patterns of housing. Murders show which parts of London had the largest servant population. Fraud and bigamy lead to homicide in middle-class areas and western suburbs; street-fighting and gang activities prove lethal in the East End and Clerkenwell. Murder preserves respectability in Holloway; youth kills for kicks in South London.

Martin Fido, The Murder Guide to London

By the above matrix, the Crippen case was clearly a middle-class murder mystery, inseparable from the suburbia in which it played out. The suburbs are centres of relative affluence, quiet comfort, workday routine and weekend leisure, and – most central to their fascination as a locus of crime – hotbeds of secrets, at least one really juicy one lurking behind every identikit door. Suburbia is where the curtains twitch and gossip never goes hungry. From wife-swapping to satanism, any Sunday tabloid could tell you that deceptively respectable suburbia is where it’s really all going on. A popular cliché defined it as the place where everybody comes from and nobody wants to return to (such was H.G. Wells’s view of his childhood in Bromley), but in the aftermath of Victorian industrialisation it was a haven and a retreat for Londoners who came increasingly to view the city as a necessary evil, but no place in which to live. In the witness statements of the Crippen case you can practically see the beady little eyes, pair upon squinting pair of them, peeping around the lace curtains: ‘Latterly there was a lady in black there, and last week there were also two lads staying with Dr Crippen… Both Mr and Mrs Crippen used to spend a great part of their time in the garden… Crippen had occasionally been seen in the company of a foreign-looking youth…’

The Crippens played out their scandal in the northward suburban spread that made neat, ordered brick worlds with names like Holloway, Highbury, St John’s Wood, Hampstead and Swiss Cottage, and lonely green islands of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park, where fields and meadows were once the norm rather than the exception. Every day ‘Dr’ Crippen would set off for New Oxford Street; every evening he would return to Islington. You could have set your watch by the old boy. But appearances are often deceptive, and never more so than in the suburbs, starkly demarcated with wall and hedgerow to mark the boundary where one territory ends and the next begins, where each semi-detached villa is a man’s castle, his uniformity without functioning as guarantor of his right to unrestrained individuality within. And even by the common standard, these were not your average English suburbanites. For one thing, both Mr and Mrs Crippen were American; for another, they were somewhat exotic blooms, trailing associations with the English music hall, sundry representatives of which they would entertain in gay parties, characterised by laughter, song, and that most unforgiven of suburban sins: slamming cab doors after midnight. Gaudy peacocks of the stage, relaxing after hours in the gaslit regularity of commuter-land: this was the first of the many juxtapositions the story would sustain.

The word ‘suburb’ is at least as old as Chaucer. Its nebulousness is baked into its very definition: it defines itself not by what it is, nor by where it is, but by what and where it is not. It is the somewhere that is nowhere, the is that isn’t. At first suburbs were not discrete entities so much as a kind of topographical footnote: the bit that was left over when you discounted the country and the town. These suburbs were sinks for everything deemed too minacious or unwholesome to remain comfortably within the city walls, from hospitals for leprosy to brothels, gambling dens and, worst of all, theatres. By the seventeenth century it was being noted that the suburbs were growing exponentially and coming to sustain their own infrastructure and society, the first step on their road to self-sufficiency and respectability: writers likened them to the wide brim around a Jesuit’s hat, far larger than the block. Once mass transport arrived, with its cheap workman’s fares allowing easy and convenient daily movement in and out of the city, they took on their now-understood character, switching from sites of banishment to sites of escape. In 1891, the journalist Sidney Low, writing in Contemporary Review, noted: ‘The Englishman of the future will be a suburb-dweller. The majority of the people of this island will live in the suburbs, and the suburban type will be the most widespread and characteristic of all.’ As the Victorian gave way to the Edwardian, the pioneering to the consolidating, it is not hard to see why suburbia held so much appeal and so much promise: what Low described as a ‘Sargasso sea of asphalt and paving’, linked inextricably with the facelessness of financial transaction and its negation of commonality, inevitably paled beside these ordered expressions of humane compromise. The best thing about suburbia was its spirit of rapprochement: it rejected the city while at the same time accommodating it. Small wonder Low envisaged ‘not one but a dozen Croydons’ forming ‘a circle of detached forts round the central stronghold’ as the living shape of England’s future. And as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, suburbia replaced both the city and the country as the default locus of consensus normality. Life, real life, was lived on trams and buses and in municipal parks and cafés, and above all, behind those curtains, with their promise both of revelation and concealment.

An irony that Crippen exposed was that it was in the supposedly heartless city that everyone knew each other’s business, and in the supposedly communal suburbs that horrors might be staged unsuspected behind respectable doors, and where neighbours, pressed for impotent comment after the fact, offered only banality and bewilderment. (They seemed such a happy couple…) And the suburbs, of course, soon became a place where murder was not only committed but consumed, in an ostensibly dubious but essentially innocent ritual of recreation, celebrated most famously by George Orwell in his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’. Orwell depicts a typical Sunday afternoon, with the suburbanite, well-fed and smoking his pipe, scanning the News of the World for a really good murder:

If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream,

Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong and Bywaters and Thompson…

In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability – the desire to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one’s social position by some scandal such as a divorce – was one of the main reasons for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen’s flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill Cream’s, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were either wife or husband of the murderer.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison.

The Crippen case, clearly, conforms in virtually every detail to Orwell’s ideal. In this context murder takes on a kind of surrogate function: it is the suburbanite’s version of theatrical tragedy. To connoisseurs of murder, the parallels between this new drama and the more established sort could hardly have been more exact. A canonical murder, like a Shakespearean tragedy, has a classic five-act structure. There is the crime, the investigation, the apprehension, the trial and the punishment. Crippen was no more immune to the allure of crime than anybody else: he declared himself ‘a reader of romances’ at his trial, and during his flight from justice he was seen to be immersed in a copy of Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men. And frequently in the Crippen affair we will catch its main players – especially Inspector Dew and Captain Kendall – in the act of playing to the gallery, as if presenting their best profile to the camera, carefully furnishing their place in posterity. As important as any professional commendation, or dressing down, was the verdict of the Sunday papers.

The first reports of the Crippen case broke on a Thursday. It was the fourteenth day of July 1910, a rare sunny day in what had been a fairly wet and cool summer. London’s Daily Mail informed its readers of the discovery with a succinctness and sobriety that would be conspicuously absent from this point on:

A discovery which was made late last night, after an exhaustive police search, at a large house in Hilldrop Crescent, Kentish Town, N.W., has led to the grave suspicion that a Mrs Crippen, who was well known in the music hall profession under the name of Belle Elmore, has been murdered and her body secretly buried.¹

The find had been made by Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Walter Dew, and the fact that he titled his autobiography I Caught Crippen may give some indication of how important he judged the case to be in terms of his lasting reputation. Hindsight is apt to make raconteurs out of all of us, as chance becomes presentiment, accidents acquire the pattern of design, the random becomes inevitable. We have no real way of knowing if Dew was really haunted by the image of Crippen’s cellar prior to his triumphant assault upon it, only that he claimed to be when time came to make history out of it all. And yet, for one so fixated upon the cellar, it was a long time indeed before he made his breakthrough there. It was no short while, for that matter, before he was even inclined to take the case of Cora Crippen’s disappearance all that seriously.

The first indications had come on 30 June. A colleague, Superintendent Frank Froest, had been consulted by John and Lilian Nash, the latter also known as Lil Hawthorne, a Nashville-born singer and principal boy in pantomime, noted for her spirited renditions of such favourites as ‘Tessie, You are the Only, Only, Only’ and ‘Don’t Cry Little Girl, Don’t Cry’. The Nashes were concerned about their friend, Cora Crippen, treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies’ Benevolent Fund, formerly a performer under the name by which they still knew her, Belle Elmore. She lived at 39, Hilldrop Crescent with her husband, a timid American medical man – the Nashes thought he might be a dentist – called Hawley Harvey Crippen, though in common with Cora and all their friends, they knew him as Peter.² It has been noted that but for their prior acquaintance with Froest, the Nashes would likely have taken the matter to their local police station rather than straight to Scotland Yard, where it could well have been buried beneath paperwork and more pressing concerns, never to have risen to the top. Another performer, Miriam Williams, aka Kate Roberts, aka Vulcana, a music hall strongwoman, had already done just that and been told that unless she was willing to make a charge there was nothing they could do. (Among the many eventful highlights of her long career, Williams was pronounced dead in 1939 after being hit by a car, and came round in the morgue in time to hear the last rites. This flavour of music hall hyperbole seemed to permeate the Crippen case, seeping outwards and reaching all in its orbit. According to a 1930 report in the Sunday News, Superintendent Froest was known as ‘the man with the iron hands’, and famed for his ability to tear packs of playing cards in two and snap sixpences as if they were biscuits. Cited without reservation even in some present-day accounts of the case, both talents are, of course, physically impossible for a person of any strength.³)

Nash repeated his story to the Coroner’s Court in July. The Coroner began by asking him when he last saw the Crippens:

They had dinner at our house, on January 19, that was the last time. They seemed all right together, and